Citations › Citation ID: 90

C90. BOOK: David C. Robertson, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (Crown, 2013), p. 255-256.

Howard enlisted a wider circle of LEGO designers and engineers to develop and perfect the line’s two most prominent, “never seen before” innovations, the die and a tiny LEGO man called a “microfig.” Designed to fit a single LEGO stud when placed on a game board, the microfig is an armless character that has the same knobby feet, stud-topped head, and facial expressiveness as its bigger sibling, the minifig. Because of the component’s prominence, its design went through eight major iterations before the final production microfig was fully born.

“We did rounds and rounds of challenge sketches,” said Howard. “And then when we thought we had it right, we found the decoration machine needed the figure to have slightly bigger feet. We had to battle with the engineers over tenths of millimeters to end up at a place where the feet were big enough for the machine to grab on to but still small enough to retain the figure’s proportions. It was fine-tune, fine-tune, fine-tune.”

It took a long time to fine-tune the design for the Microfig (Part 85863).